The space between things

Yesterday someone told me that there’s a Japanese word for the space between things. I looked it up and it’s ‘ma’.

It reminded me of my friend Paul’s idea for a photographic project about the space between objects in a museum.

And it reminded me of a conversation with my friend Annabel about allowing space for people to use their imagination in a museum. As a writer and interpretation developer, I suppose my ideal museum should be crammed with words and explicit meaning, but I think something is lost when you push a museum too hard to say everything out loud.

Not even children want everything explained to them. They can wander happily through museums making things up. Or, as my eldest niece did at the age of four, pointing at a large stuffed gorilla and saying ‘Papa’ with a dead straight face.